2018 The Big Ideas

Shopping is Personal

Retailers are using technology to be better merchants, to improve efficiencies, to streamline the supply chain, and to make the shopping experience more personal.

Laura Heller, Editor, Retail Dive

Walmart’s Store No. 8

“We wanted to incubate new capabilities, new businesses that we think will be transformational to next generation retail. These are the ideas that probably wouldn’t make it on the traditional roadmap today, so we made Store No. 8 to parallel-path, working in the present but looking towards the future.”

Katie Finnegan, Katie Finnegan

Armed with Data

“New retail is becoming a new reality. It’s the harmonious integration of online and offline. It’s about enhancing payment options—frictionless, easy, seamless. It’s out of the box logistics, how do we get everything to the customer whenever, wherever?”

Deborah Weinswig, Managing Director, Fung Global Retail & Technology

“AI allows retailers to connect with customers in new ways. 2018 is the year for AI.”

Deborah Weinswig, Managing Director, Fung Global Retail & Technology

Cool Storefronts,
Hot Data

“Consumers are looking for that synchronized experience. If you have their data, if they’ve been shopping online, they also expect you to know who they are when you go into the store.”

Piers Fawkes, Founder and President, PSFK

“In the real world, retailers and brands can connect with consumers in a way that they can’t online.”

Piers Fawkes, Founder and President, PSFK

“Over the last ten years we’ve built up different silos. We have our e-commerce team, we have a retail team, we have a mobile team, but shoppers don’t think of it like that. They just see omnichannel, and they just want to buy from the retailer.”

Piers Fawkes, Founder and President, PSFK

Selling High Tech with
High Tech

“One of the biggest retail trends you’ll see over the next few years is the move to purchase-in-store. We’re using all that huge retail real estate and moving from holding retail in the store to creating touchpoint interactions for online purchasing.”

Tabitha Creighton, SVP, Payment Solutions, iQmetrix Software

Machine to Machine
Commerce in Retail

“In this new world that we’re building, it should be ‘My data, my money, my rules.’ As we build a democracy of a devices, that data holds tremendous value, and where does that value flow to?”

Pindar Wong, Chairman, VeriFi (Hong Kong) Limited

Experiential Shopping

Moving from idea to implementation is the trick. We know tools like AR and VR are out there but we need to figure out how to move forward with it.”

Anne Marie Stephen, CEO + Founder, kwolia

“You can interact with a smart display using hand gestures, facial expressions, and mobile integrations. We use machine learning and computer vision to understand who’s looking at the display and create a shopping and gaming experience for you in the store window without you even needing to come inside.”

Omer Golan, CEO/Founder, OUTERNETS

“There’s a trillion products on e-commerce, and in the next five years every single one of them will need a 3D version of it. We’re creating a system to capture all those products at scale for e-commerce and to enhance the in-store experience.”

Alan Smithson, CEO, MetaVRse

“There are lots of folks looking to get into unattended retail. There’s a lot of necessary components to make all that happen, and it can be be barrier of entry into the market. We want to be the gateway that makes those transactions possible.”

“We wanted to incubate new capabilities, new businesses that we think will be transformational to next generation retail. These are the ideas that probably wouldn’t make it on the traditional roadmap today, so we made Store No. 8 to parallel-path, working in the present but looking towards the future.”

“There is a process, not just ‘let’s throw some gadget in the store.’ We ask clients to make teams from across departments and work with us to find the use cases that work best for them.”

Salvador Nissi Vilcovsk, Founder & CEO Memomi

Pathways to Retail

“At this point in the evolution of voice, it’s really vanilla or chocolate in terms of brands dominating marketplace. The question is whether the space is already at critical mass or has room for other players.”

Alan Wolf, Senior Content Producer, Twice Magazine

“The future of retail is really around omni-channel. For a lot of people that used to just mean you could buy the product wherever. We were sort of agnostic about whether it was online or offline. But now the really successful retail companies are creating experiences that translate across all devices and locations, and eventually to AR and VR.”

“A lot of the entrepreneurs that come to us, their number one goal is to get into retail, and it’s very difficult to do that as an early stage entrepreneur. We need more support for innovation and startups that helps them test a retail presence with less risk.”

Bret Harris, Director of Business Development, Indiegogo

“We try not to force retail, we try to let it evolve as the business grows. I don’t think retail is the answer anymore. You can have a really good direct-to-consumer business that’s ten times as profitable as a retail-focused operation.”

Chad Hetherington, CEO, The Stable

“Retail today in the wholesale model is broken. You sell to the retailer, they mark it up, and you have no idea what happened to the products when they’re on the shelf. You, as the maker, should have physical control of everything. You should own the price, you should have the ability to change the marketing message, all in real time.”

Philip Raub, Founder/CBO, b8ta

“In this day and age there’s a belief that a lot of the disruptive technology will come from start ups and smaller entries because the barriers to entry have really come down. You can set up a website, you can get crowdfunding. We’re putting a real effort out there to engage with the entrepreneur community.”

Gene Han, VP, Innovation, Target

How Augmented Reality Makes the Perfect You

“The AR has solves the pain point of every girl. It’s so tough if you want to try different lipsticks and see which color fit you more, it’s almost impossible in the real world. But AR makes it possible.”

Alice Chang, CEO, Perfect Corp.

YouCam is using AR technologies to reshape the way customers experience, shop, and interact with makeup.”

Adam Gam, Vice President of Marketing, Perfect Corp.

“We’re not a tech company, but what we realized is that tech is the conduit to allow us to connect with the consumer, have them seamlessly try on our entire product catalogue, get inspired, and then buy.”

Smart Retail as an Ecosystem

“The future of retail is smart, experiential, personalized—most importantly, it’s rapidly changing, and there’s unique combinations of tech. If you thought you knew how to manage or analyze it, you may not. The metrics are constantly changing.”

Maureen Conners, Board Director, Fashion Incubator SF

“When we utilize blockchain in retail, we can build trust and a single digital truth directly into the consumer experience.”

Phil Gomes, Senior Vice President, U.S. B2B Digital, Edelman

YouCam is using AR technologies to reshape the way customers experience, shop, and interact with makeup.”

Kyle Walker, Head of New Business Strategy, Amazon Exclusives Amazon

“We’re not a tech company, but what we realized is that tech is the conduit to allow us to connect with the consumer, have them seamlessly try on our entire product catalogue, get inspired, and then buy.”

“Retail has been about the selling of stuff, but the stuff itself is becoming an active component of the retail experience in itself. You can interact with it in the store, you can learn about it, and after you’ve bought it, you can use it as a mobile retail environment to buy other products.”